Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/331

Rh ignorant of the art of writing, could leave behind them no permanent records, and as tribes were frequently broken up, in consequence of famine, internal dissensions, and other calamities, their oral traditions had little chance of surviving. It was only in a few districts that a settled and comparatively civilised population existed. Wherever such a centre of civilisation was formed, the nomads in the immediate vicinity had a tendency to fall under the influence of their more cultured neighbours, and sometimes tribal confederacies, dignified with the name of "kingdoms," came into being. In early times, by far the most important of these civilised regions was to be found in south-western Arabia, the land of the Sabaeans, or, as it is now called, Yaman (i.e. the South). The power and prosperity of the Sabaeans, to which innumerable ruins and inscriptions still bear witness, began to decline about the time of Christ and were utterly overthrown, near the beginning of the sixth century, by the inroads of the half-savage Abyssinians. Meanwhile other Arabian kingdoms had arisen in the north, in particular that of the clan called the Ghassān, on the eastern frontier of Palestine, and that of the Lakhm on the Euphrates; the former kingdom was politically subject to the Byzantine Emperors, the latter to the Persians. But about the time when Mahomet came forward as a prophet both of these vassal kingdoms ceased to exist, and for a while there was nowhere within the borders of Arabia any political organisation which deserved to be called a State.

In religious, as in political matters, Arabia presented no appearance of unity. The paganism of the Arabs was in general of a remarkably crude and inartistic kind, with no ritual pomp, no elaborate mythology, and, it hardly needs to be said, no tinge of philosophical speculation. The religion of the ancient Sabaeans probably bore a greater resemblance to that of the more advanced nations, but in the time of Mahomet this Sabaean religion was almost wholly forgotten, and the paganism which still survived consisted mainly of certain very primitive rites performed at particular sanctuaries. An Arabian sanctuary was, in some cases, a rudely constructed edifice containing images of the gods or other objects of worship, but often it was nothing more than an open space marked by a sacred tree or a few blocks of stone. Some sanctuaries were frequented only by members of a particular tribe, while others were annually visited by various tribes from far and near. The settled Arabs, as a rule, paid more attention than the nomads to religion, but even in the settled districts there seems to have been a singular lack of religious fervour. The traditional rites were kept up from mere conservatism and with hardly any definite belief as to their meaning. Hence wherever the Arabs came into close contact with a foreign religion, they readily adopted it, at least in name. Arabian communities professing some sort of Christianity were to be found not only on the northern frontier but also at Najrān in the south. Judaised communities were especially numerous